Sunday, March 20, 2016

Musical Television

For the last few months I've been watching the musical 2 hours on Antennae TV on Sunday afternoons. The first hour is The Monkees and the second is The Partridge Family.

It really is amazing how very different these shows could be.

I've loved The Monkees for years and years and I find the show to be very enjoyable even now, but when aired next to The Partridge Family, it is easy to see how bad the show actually was.

The music is timeless, and the guys were decent actors, but the writing for The Monkees was terrible, awful even.

There was such potential if they really did a show about a band. If they would have even done a show that parodied A Hard Day's Night, which was supposed to be what the band was about, it could have been great.

I'm not saying that there weren't good episodes, because there were, especially in the second season. The Devil and Peter Tork and The Christmas Episode, but this was a show that could have been so much more, especially with the talent of the stars

Its really only been recently that I've taken a shine to The Partridge Family. I watched them a little bit when I was little, but not much. Seeing the two shows back to back, you can really see the differences and yet both shows have a lot of similarities.

The primary difference is that The Partridge Family didn't try to be a real band, it was David Cassidy.

This show only started a year or so after The Monkees ended, but this show was so much more developed. There are actual stories that make sense, rather than just silly ones.

Sure this show was based on The Cowsills, but they did so much and the show is entertaining, regardless of how you feel about the music.

Which show did you like better?

3 comments:

Diane said...

I equally loved both shows. Loved the Monkees wacky humor and loved David Cassidy!

rashbre said...

I still chuckle if I see a random episode of The Monkees on telly. And I somehow seem to know just about every song!

allenwoodhaven said...

I liked the Monkees better. I liked the silliness and anarchy of it all. The Partridge Family was okay, but was too much a musical version of The Brady Bunch. My sisters liked the Bradys, but I wasn't a big fan.